Adventures in DIY Flooring - Cutting the Rug III

It is taking me awhile to get started installing the planks. There are a couple of reasons for this. First, I didn't have written directions specifically for this product. I mean, I understand the gist of the whole thing, but once you start you're stuck or you're wasting product. I just happen to like going in confident with the support of documented methods! Eventually I got some PDF directions that the retailer got from their rep and emailed to me. Second, I had to wait on the stair nose piece because they are generally made-to-order or on some kind of schedule and therefore can't just be rush shipped at extra cost. That took 2 weeks after bringing home the planks  Anyway, Eric and I unloaded all the boxes into the living room in a mostly-out-of-the-way place behind some chairs on the Saturday after I brought them home.

After "patiently" waiting 15 days I finally got going on Saturday and once I decided where to start and laid a few rows, it went poorly. Why? Well the floor was out of level just enough that to keep the planks from locking together properly. Sigh. As this happened after the local building supply place closed on Saturday (1:00p), it meant a Sunday trip to Missoula to buy all the things it take to apply/install self-leveling underlayment. I could have gone on Saturday afternoon, but I was crestfallen and cranky just couldn't face it.

The First Planks... The First Time. Sigh.

This did not mean I didn't make progress on Saturday afternoon, because there is an issue with the subfloor at the top of the stairs and I started tackling it. Because the lip on the stair nose piece is shallower than the cobbled together edge that was under the carpet there and wouldn't cover them, I had to remove those pieces (one fir and one plywood) and replace it with some oak to blend with the stair riser. Yeah. What would've been perfect is a 4' length of 1x2 oak that I could make into a 5/8" thick piece. What I could get nearby was a 9' length (yes, even the employees were surprised about the 9' length) of 1x4. All but about half of one side will be covered, so it only has to look "pretty" on that one bit. With some creative cutting with my table saw, I have a good start. I need to knuckle down and tackle some creative "nibbling" with the table saw before it's done.

I have no idea what these stairs are finished with and given some stories I have heard about the last owners and how the floors are wearing since we got here, I would say they are finished with something other than professional-level products. Like maybe something seen on a late night infomercial. Ahem. This bit certainly isn't going to get any wear, but this makes matching quite difficult particularly as wood stain stuff is far from my forte. So the goal was to get close and hope it mostly goes unnoticed. It being the top stair means it's at eye-level at some point, but oh well!

Primed.

So, here is the guest room floor after the self-leveling process. This process... well it didn't go as expected or wished for. I kind of (actually) did it twice. The whole thing got me quite frustrated and temporarily semi-paralyzed, even though I understand that a 42 year old house is just not going to have totally level floors - especially on the 2nd story and it's not any real indication of some historical half-assery. Anyway... I ended up msixxing 6 bags and the whole thing took about 2.5 "extra" hours to apply.. Then I had to level out the "self-leveling underlayment" with a feathering product. I used 1.25-ish boxes and this added about 6 "extra" hours over the 9 times I applied it. All these steps had to cure for 16 hours - each of the nine times time I did part of it.  I hope this means I'll be laying planks on Friday - the second Friday after this all started. Finally!

Leveled! Or close enough to it.

All my research led me to two different brands of self-leveling material. Both of these brands are designed and promoted as ones you can apply flooring over fairly quickly - as soon as 3 hours for tile. I think this worked against me, as I learned later that these really are not one-person jobs. But I am just one person despite my mightiness. For the rest of the rooms, I am going to look for something less quick-setting which might make for better results with a one-person application. And perhaps ultimately it will mean less time between evacuating a room and laying the planks.

During those 16 hour curing windows, I worked on some other time-sensitive crafting projects, so at least there was that bright spot! Of course that is also when we slept, cooked & ate, shopped for more materials, and wrote blog posts. Oh yeah, and I had to buy a saw so I could cut back all the door jambs and some of the door mouldings. I wanted to avoid anything even remotely like this situation we inherited in the upstairs bathroom. Luckily, that will go away when I redo that floor later this year.

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More unforeseen additional steps:

Oiling baseboards, since they were already taken out.
Leveling the floors which exceeded the tolerance of the material.
Fashioning & staining a piece of oak to under the stair nose piece.
Cutting back all the door frames and some of the door moulding.

A cool new saw was required, so at least there's some tool-geekery involved.